Welcome Home, Graduate! A Template for Parents in Congratulating Your Son or Daughter

We can’t tell you how proud we were to see you up on that stage, receiving your diploma! Now that you’ve graduated, you’re in a world filled with so very many wonderful, wonderful opportunities! This world, unfortunately, is reserved for people who graduated before 2005. Naturally, you’ll need to move back home.

But please know that our home is always your home, and that you’ll always have a roof over your head. However, we feel as though we should warn you about a few minor alterations. For starters, we’ve turned your room into an aquarium. You may question our logic on this (and most other matters), but we can’t tell you how many blissful hours we’ve spent watching the clown fish as they laze among their sea anemones, or those spunky little bull sharks as they fight over their mating territory.

We’ve re-wallpapered most of the room with local newspaper clippings of your elementary-school classmate [Wealthy Schoolmate’s Name Here]’s various I.P.O.’s, which we’ve cross-referenced in the guest bathroom with more recent articles from Forbes. We’ve cleared out your bookshelves to make room for your mother’s collection of antique *objets d’*QVC, and, to save on space, we’ve taken all your shoes and swapped them with pairs that are two sizes smaller. Also, we’ve given your sister a yacht.

Now, the yacht may seem unrelated to your present accommodations (or, should we say, lack thereof), but we thought you’d want to know that all our money is being used for slip fees and gasoline taxes and piña colada mix. As we speak, she and her most recent emotionally unstable boyfriend are schooner-ing around the tropical islands of Papua New Guinea. And, no, you may not sleep in her room.

Which reminds us—your bad habits. Let’s start with the most troubling and expensive: eating. We’ve dead-bolted the fridge so you can get used to the starving sensation so common among recent college graduates. You will, however, notice the Styrofoam cups and little Sharpie markers your mother left on the counter by the pantry (also dead-bolted, so don’t even bother). Panhandling’s a wonderful opportunity to supplement your income re-stocking Redboxes in front of the shopping center where everyone—the neighbors, high school classmates, childhood bullies, everyone!—shops.

We’ll be opening your mail from here on out, just in case you receive anything important—brochures for the Peace Corps, military, ITT Technical Institute—so we can pre-emptively accept any underpaying job offers or inappropriate marriage proposals, and to burn all graduate-school applications that may come your way. You’re ours, now. All ours.

In a few weeks, we’ll start bullying you with all sorts of advice, with a specific focus on anything that’s generally useless in this day and age, but only after we’ve had loud dinnertime conversations about our support of any political beliefs that are in direct opposition to your own. Your happiness annoys us beyond measure. Every word, thought, or action—particularly the irksome way you breathe—is slowly killing us, you know. Killing us. We’re both going to start using the phrases “harsh realities” and “difficult decisions”—and not just when referring to decisions about what Christmas bonuses we’ll be giving the crew of [Sister’s Yacht’s Name Here] this year!

You may want your privacy, and we certainly understand. It would be difficult for anyone, let alone someone of your age, having to move home after years of independence, slowly losing hope in the face of shrinking opportunities, and growing increasingly annoyed after realizing that their parents have set up a webcam live-feed to track your movements and monetize the entire operation. (Visit [Domain Name Bespeaking Worthlessness of Child Here], and be sure to click on our ads!)

But it’ll all feel better, especially once we’ve dressed you up in your old baby clothes for our enforced nightly viewings of your pre-school photo albums. We’ll be watching from the other room (via webcam), silently wondering what went wrong.

As the months go by, you may start to notice several things—flashbacks, nightmares, hair loss, crippling bouts of depression, problems with sleep (not brought on by the mating bull sharks), the uncontrollable need to wash your hands, an odd fixation on the numbers seven and nine, an unshakable feeling that all your accomplishments are worthless, that you’re floating outside of your body, and that the universe at large is conspiring against you. Not to worry, [Child’s Name Here], because it’s all in your head!

Anyway, we’d say more, but you’ve got your future to consider. As we said at the beginning of this letter, we can’t tell you how proud we are! Largely because we aren’t. So maybe you’ll think twice before wasting our money on another useless, useless degree.